Jaggi on Khouri

I missed this piece when it appeared in last weekend’s Guardian Review, until a reader kindly sent me the link: Maya Jaggi’s profile of Elias Khouri. Here’s a snippet:

Khoury may be well placed to assess the aspirations and tensions among Palestinians in Lebanon’s 12 camps, who remain “in closed ghettos, separated from Lebanese society”. As a young Lebanese at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut in the 1970s, he spent years gathering from refugees their personal histories of the mass expulsions that attended the creation of Israel. He felt the stories should be given to an Arab Tolstoy, and imagined himself in the role (“everybody laughed”), but says, “I never dared write it then because I didn’t know how.”

More here.